November 2, 2013

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JobTorch.ca initial release

by Reza Shirazian

Well it’s been almost a year since our last update, however I can assure you my silence is not synonymous with being idle. In fact it’s been the exact opposite. Following the release of “Around the world in 5 differences” I started to think about the future and what Front Row should do next. Front Row’s Apps reaching the 75,000 download mark all with positive reviews demanded a more ambitious project. I also wanted to work on something completely different. Having BizSpark and Microsoft’s MSDN subscription provided a wide scope of opportunities, and I wanted to make sure Front Row took full advantage of it.

After meeting a talented designer through a friend and sitting down and brainstorming, we came up with the idea of an employment aggregate for oil and gas companies.

One system that automatically gathers and collects all oil and gas job opportunities from their website and posts them in one central place. Our goals was to make something simple and complete.

Eight months of hard work and we ended up with JobTorch.net: An employment aggregate for individuals seeking a career in the oils and gas industry. Although our talented designer got scouted and moved to Seattle to work for Amazon, I tried to stay true to his vision with the layout and the feel of the website.

This has been an extremely challenging project but at the same time it’s been the most fun I’ve had building something. Learning MVC4, using Entity Frameworks, finally learning how to use jQuery/Javascript and being introduced to Bootstrap were all worth the headaches. Also taking advantage of Windows Azure really made me appreciate the scalability and ease of use of cloud computing. The joy of not having to deal with iis when deploying a website is indescribable.

As it stands right now, JobTorch.net crawls the following 22 companies:

Suncor

Imperial Oil

Husky Energy

Canadian Natural Resources

Cenovus

Encana

Talisman Energy

Nexen

Syncrude

Conoco Philips

Conoco Philips USA

Trans Canada

Enbridge

Devon Energy

StatOil

Shell

PennWest

MEG Energy

BP

Harvest Energy

ExxonMobil

Jacos

I’m aiming to increase this to a 100 within the next three months and begin work on posting premium positions and premium accounts for power users and companies. I’m also planning on keeping this blog more active, so if you’re interested on following project JobTorch.net follow this blog or Front Row’s twitter account @frontrowsoft. I promise my next post will not be in a year 😉